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Shakespeare on stage

Shakespeare on the Indian stage
after Independence

Three Witches: Kannada Macbeth, directed K.V.
Akshara, 1987.

Girish Karnad, the eminent contemporary Kannada playwright,
remarked in an interview: 'Whenever I am asked "Who is the
playwright who has influenced you the most?" I say,
"Shakespeare".' [10] Karnad's play Tughlaq, featuring a
medieval Delhi sultan, is steeped in Shakespeare's History
Plays. Virtually all leading Indian theatrepersons since
Independence have been well versed in Shakespeare. Yet it
seems fair to say that Shakespeare is not a continuous or
pervasive presence in post-Independence Indian drama. The end
of the previous section suggests some reasons why this should
be so. The Marathi B.V. Warerkar indicates the depth of the
reaction to Shakespeare. 'He is not good for our modern
Marathi theatre,' said Warerkar in 1964. 'Our modern age
demands realism and Shakespeare cannot give us a realistic
theatre. He retards it.' [11]

Durga Khote as Lady Macbeth in
Rajmukut, a Marathi adaptation of
Macbeth, 1954.

Yet Marathi has seen the most major Shakespearean
numbers since Independence: a 1950 revival of
Zunzarrao (the 1890 version of
Othello), V.V. Shirwadkar's adaptations of
Macbeth (as Rajmukut, 'The Royal
Crown', 1954, featuring the celebrated Nanasaheb Phatak
and Durga Khote) and Othello (1960), Nana
Joag's 3-act Hamlet (1957), Vinda Karandikar's
King Lear (1974), Vijay Kenkre's
Dream (1991, controversially incorporating 14
Marathi poems). One could expand the list. By contrast,
the distinguished course of Bengali art theatre since
the 1950s has adapted many Western plays but almost
wholly eschewed Shakespeare, with the interesting
exception of the Marxist actor-producer Utpal Dutt.

English-language productions still have a certain
presence. Amateur groups are active in most urban
centres: earlier, perhaps, in Kolkata above all, but
nowadays most sustainedly in the annual productions of
the Shakespeare Society at St Stephen's College, Delhi.
The lively English theatre in Mumbai has offered a
number of Shakespeare plays over the years: among
others, Alyque Padamsee's Hamlet (1964) and
Othello (1990), Vikram Kapadia and Naseeruddin
Shah's Julius Caesar (1992), and several plays
by the Phoenix Players led by Salim Ghouse and Anita
Salim. Kolkata saw a distinguished Hamlet by
the Red Curtain group in 1972, and a line of
productions at Jadavpur University culminating in
Ananda Lal's The Merchant of Venice (1997)
with its controversial female Shylock and 'Antonia'.

Touring companies still visit regularly, chiefly from the UK
under British Council auspices. But there is no sustained
Shakespearean presence in the English-language theatre in
India today. The situation was different 40 or 50 years ago,
as evinced above all by the success of Shakespeareana. This
professional company survived solely by acting Shakespeare in
English, in fairly 'straight' performances across the
subcontinent. In their heyday, they put on 879 performances
between June 1953 and December 1956 alone. Their leader and
proprietor, the expatriate Englishman Geoffrey Kendal, tells
the story of the company in his lively memoirs. [12] Kendal and his family
played themselves in the Ivory-Merchant film Shakespeare
Wallah, based on their own lives. [External link:
a group photograph of the Shakespeareana
('Shakespearewallah') troupe.]

Shakespeareana catered chiefly to school and college
audiences; but it made a wider contribution by offering an
early platform to Utpal Dutt, the illustrious Bengali actor,
director and dramatist, and Shashi Kapoor, the eminent Mumbai
film actor and scion of a celebrated cinematic family. (His
father Prithviraj Kapoor had acted Shakespeare during his
stint in Grant Anderson's Mumbai-based Indian National
Theatre Company.)

A Marxist, Utpal Dutt also had links with the historic Indian
People's Theatre Association. He wrote a scholarly if
doctrinaire Bengali work on Shakespeare's social philosophy,
and presented Shakespeare in the same vein through his Little
Theatre Group in the 1950s and 1960s before moving on to
other distinguished work. He estimates having had a hand in
at least 16 Shakespeare productions. Among them are
Macbeth (1954, performed at least 100 times in
Bengal villages as well as Kolkata), The Merchant of
Venice (1955), Julius Caesar (1957),
Othello (1958), Romeo and Juliet and A
Midsummer-Night's Dream (both 1964). Yet the play Dutt
declared himself to prefer above all was Timon, of
which, in despite of his own views, he offered a surprising
Christian interpretation in his book on Shakespeare.

There have been many other Bengali versions, including a
spate in the Quatercentenary year, but nothing strikingly new
or memorable. More creative interest has been evinced in
Marathi, as described above, and in some innovative
adaptations in Kannada, also cited earlier. In Malayalam,
V.N. Parameswaran Pillai has offered several notable
Shakespeare numbers. In Punjabi, the playwright Balwant Gargi
began by following Ibsen and Strindberg. But a trip to Europe
and Stratford in the 1950s converted him to the Bard, and he
came back committed to a Shakespearean programme
unprecedented in Punjabi drama.

Othello and Iago: From Urdu Othello, directed
by E. Alkazi, National School of Drama, Delhi, 1969.

But the most significant productions since Independence have
been individual endeavours, sometimes faintly suggesting
groups or trends. Delhi's National School of Drama (NSD) has
a bouquet of contributions. Ebrahim Alkazi, a celebrated
director of the NSD, produced a Hindi King Lear
(1964) and an Urdu Othello (1969) - impressive but
fairly 'straight' versions of Shakespeare's work. After
professional estrangement and self-exile, he returned to
produce, inter alia, a Hindi Julius Caesar
(1992) for the NSD Repertory Company. The NSD also has other
Shakespeare numbers to its credit, including public
productions by students and even a Dream in
conjunction with handicapped persons. (In a comparable social
programme, inmates of a Bangalore jail acted a Kannada
Julius Caesar in July 2000.)

The King and the Fool: from Maharaja Yashwant Rao,
Hindi adaptation of King Lear, directed by Amal
Allana. 1989

Amal Allana directed a noted Hindi Lear in Delhi in
1989. The Kolkata group Padatik produced a Hindi Raja
Lear in 1988 under a German director, Fritz Bennewitz of
the Weimar National Theatre. In Hindi again was Barnam
Vana (Birnam Wood), a 1979 Hindi adaptation of
Macbeth by a later head of the NSD, B.V. Karanth.
Karanth hails from the southern state of Karnataka, and his
Delhi production utilized that state's folk form of
Yakshagana.

The three Witches from Barnam Vana,
the 1979 Hindi version of Macbeth directed by
B.V.Karanth.

Shakespeare has made more extensive entry into another south
Indian dance-drama form, Kathakali. Its Delhi-based exponent
Sadanam Balakrishnan produced a Kathakali Othello
(1997). More curiously, the London Globe staged a
Kathakali King Lear in 1999 in collaboration with
Annette Leday's French Kathakali company. Also of British
provenance was Hilary Westlake's adapted Shrew
(1991), which used Kathakali alongside another classical
Indian dance form, Bharatanatyam. Leday in her turn joined
forces with the German Bremer Shakespeare Company in a
Tempest (2000) where German actors represented the
white colonizers in a magical island inhabited by spirits,
enacted by Leday's Indian dancers.

Arjun Raina, an indefatigable Shakespearean innovator,
adapted Kathakali in a 'fusion piece' combining
Othello and the Dream (Delhi, 2001). Before
that Royston Abel had worked Kathakali with much else into
Othello - A Study in Black and White (Delhi, 1999).
The play shows an Indian troupe rehearsing Othello
under an Italian director and, in the process, opening up
various ruptures and conflicts in contemporary Indian
society. This was a trilingual production in English, Hindi
and Assamese (the language of the actor playing Othello).
Abel followed it up with other 'Shakespearean rehearsal'
plays.

More seriously innovative was Habib Tanvir's adaptation of
A Midsummer Night's Dream as Kamdeo ka Apna,
Vasant Ritu ka Sapna ('The Love-God's Own, a Springtime
Dream', 1993). This too is a multilingual and
cross-cultural piece, planned for British players in the
royal and urban roles alongside the 'mechanicals' played by
rustic members of Tanvir's Naya (New) Theatre, from the
central Indian tribal region (now state) of Chhattisgarh. The
play incorporates the north Indian musical folk-theatre form
of Nautanki. When funds dried up, the British actors
were replaced by Indians from Delhi; but the play revolves
round the tribal workmen, and presents a notable critique of
elite culture - extending by implication to the Shakespearean
original.

In 1997 came Macbeth: Stage of Blood directed by
Lokendra Arambam, the radical director from the north-eastern
state of Manipur. The production reflected the political
turmoils of the state as well as its regional culture and
ethnic practices. It was set on water: the Loktak Lake in
Manipur, and later the Thames at London. Water and earth
acquire traditional symbolic tones here. Birnam Wood is
simulated by reed mats on boats, and Macbeth's body finally
drifts out across the water - as new land emerges and the
cycle of violence seems set to resume.

Tanvir's and Arambam's work provide the finest recent
instances of creative Indian reworking of Shakespeare. While
such productions continue, Shakespeare will retain a living
presence in Indian theatre. But unlike a hundred years ago,
he will not be a continuing presence in his own right, merely
an occasional contributor to a theatrical agenda shaped by
other themes, techniques and concerns.

Again, much of the Indian urban elite has exchanged its
precious bilingualism for sole reliance on a distinctively
Indian English; but this is more geared to global commerce
and showbiz. At the same time, the serious Indian-language
cultural enthusiast has moved on to other Western interests
and grafted them more intricately into the growth of his own
soil. Shakespeare struck seed in that soil two centuries ago,
and will not be dislodged; but he is likely to flower less
abundantly in the century ahead of us.